Video marketing... improve your website ranking

With search engines now including video content in blended search results, Video SEO offers one of the greatest opportunities for companies to cost-effectively drive increased site visitation. A recent study by Forrester Research found that videos, properly submitted, were 53 times more likelyto generate a first page Google ranking than traditional SEO techniques

Overview

With search engines now including video content in blended search results, Video SEO offers one of the greatest opportunities for companies to cost‐effectively drive increased site visitation. A recent study by Forrester Research found that videos, properly submitted, were 53 times more likelyto generate a first page Google ranking than traditional SEO techniques1. However, many companies are either ignoring video SEO altogether, only submitting the pages on which videos reside and not the videos themselves, or worst of all, submitting their video assets to YouTube under the misunderstanding that this will generate SEO benefits. This whitepaper will outline the proper strategies for submitting videos to the major search engines, and harnessing the power of Video SEO.

What is Video SEO?

By now, most companies are familiar with the benefits of traditional SEO and have some type of SEO strategy in place, usually focused on a combination of page text and meta‐data combined with a linking strategy designed to drive increased page rank. These pages are either discovered by the major search engine crawlers, or submitted directly to the search engines themselves by means of an XML site map.Video SEO shares many of the same goals, and some of the same strategies, as traditional SEO, but requires different

tools and methodologies to ensure proper search engine indexing and the best possible resultant search ranking.
At its simplest, Video SEO is the technique of submitting videos to the major search engines so that they are displayed in the default search results, which most search engines label as "Web" results. While video SEO may also generate search results in the "Video" results section, this is considerably less desirable as the vast majority of search volume and click‐through occurs in the default "Web" section.

Why is Video SEO so much more effective than traditional SEO?

Although video SEO is not dissimilar to traditional SEO, it has two distinct advantages. Firstly, Google and other search engines work to have a mix of content types displayed in search results (aka Blended Search Results). For this reason, they give a higher ranking to video content than other forms of web content in order to make sure that searches consistently display mixed search results. Secondly, there is a relative dearth of video content available today, and only a small fraction of the content available is properly submitted to search engines for inclusion in the search indexes. This combination of disproportionate bias towards video content and the small pool of indexed video content available is a gold mine for publish

Why don't traditional techniques work with video SEO?

Although the search engines are making continual improvements to their automated search indexing "crawlers" and "bots", these tools still have difficulty in discovering Flash content. So, although a video may exist on a page, these automated techniques will not discover the video content, and as a result, that content will not appear in the search results. Only content which is properly submitted according to the submission and XML‐serialization guidelines of each individual search engine will successfully appear in search results.

What about YouTube?

Many marketers erroneously believe that uploading their video content provides strong SEO benefits. They believe that videos submitted to YouTube will appear in search results, and furthermore, that if they embed these videos on their site, that search results will drive click‐through traffic to their destination.While it is true that videos uploaded to YouTube will appear in search results, all results will click through to the YouTube site, regardless of where embedded videos are reposted. Marketers should also be aware that content uploaded to YouTube becomes the property of Google, and that by contributing content to Google, they are ceding all copyright to that work.

Conclusion

Video SEO is a powerful tool, and should be part of the marketing arsenal of all online publishers. However, successful indexing requires a specific implementation for each individual search engine, and can best be enhanced by submitting videos and pages in parallel. Your video platform provider can be powerful enabler, but it's crucial to make sure that links will point back to your site, ensuring traffic arrives at your destination. Done right, video SEO can increase search engine performance by over 5000% and provide a powerful new marketing tool for your organization.